Brave Bow is pretty lategame so you gotta plan early on. Plus, it's more effective the higher Bernie's Strength stat is hence why I fed her all of my energy drops. She's pretty much a super mobile delete button by the endgame.
Nobody in this game has EXP issues, especially with Byleth's God tier personal.
It's not really a matter of being 2nd best at anything. I don't think anybody on the team is gunning for his particular niche. He starts at D lance and D riding (the latter of which is really good due to the strength of mounted units) and has the 2nd most consistent growths on the team (even Byleth is flipping coins on all of her major stats, lol).
Going brigand and picking up Death Blow (it's that good lmao) and having him delete stuff with a Brave Lance is the way to go for him, imo.
Y'know what, I'd forgotten that the Brave Bow is supposed to be late game - I got one off an exchange student pretty early.
I suppose you're right about Caspar, but again - you can
make him great, but other units in BE already
are, and then he's got to compete against recruited units from other houses... Ferdinand has a similar issue, frankly.
Stride is definitely broken i think they could improve a lot by giving the enemies better battalions and better AI to use them effectively but i don't know if that's what they'll do, the rest of the stuff at least can be ignored you can just rest every weekend and not start with a NG+ and that should already ramp up the challenge significantly.
Not to mention there are actually some interesting maps in the game although most of them were the paralgues imo, but some story maps could be imporved by making turn deadlines much tighter and make some of the side stuff like rescuing villagers or defeating the death knight or protecting the crest stones etc... actual objectives.
I've noticed that a lot of enemies don't actually have ranks in Authority, which is why their Battalions suck so hard. Fixing enemy skills would go a ways, as would giving more units equipment. Stuff like Stride is probably too advanced for the AI to use effectively, but if they could figure out even a few cases, it'd be incredible.
Agreed on the objectives thing. I'd love to see them make a serious effort at branching out on that front. Rescuing villagers is... probably not how I'd go, those fuckers are stupid as hell. But adding Defense, Escape, and Seize missions in would be a good start, and then they can really start shaking things up. How about an Assassinate objective, where you have to kill the enemy commander and then need to escape their enraged army, or some combination of Seize where you need to clear out the area and then defend it for x turns? Oh, or Escapex2, where you need to get to and from a point on the map while the rest of the team holds the way.
I can't speak for Blue Lions or Golden Deer but it doesn't look like either of those houses have "bad" characters either
They finally made a fire emblem game where everyone in your starting roster is more or less viable, what the fuck
They had to - what happens if you end up with just them? Everybody else is totally missable!
Besides, the instruction and class mechanics in this one give you soooo much leeway in building people up. I really hadn't considered all the options yet, but really, it's pretty nuts.